The carnage in the East that changed the course of the First World War
by Nick Lloyd 672pp, Viking, T £25 (0808 196 6794), RRP £30, ebook £10.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
It is an oddity of how the British have written and read history over the past century that the Great War, which started because of events in eastern Europe, has largely been interpreted and remembered through the prism of more than four years of carnage taking place on a strip of land that ran from the Channel down the French/Belgian and French/ German borders. Yet as Nick Lloyd reminds us in The Eastern Front, his exhaustive, highly detailed and meticulously researched book, the consequences of the fighting in the central and south-eastern European theatres were profound for the future of the continent – indeed, of the world.
It was along this front – frozen in the winter, baked in the summer – that the principal mistakes and executions of policy were made that put Britain, France, Italy and the United States in the victors’ chairs at the 1919 Versailles conference, changing the map of Europe for ever and prompting the discord and instability that provoked the resumption of hostilities in 1939. The main combatants on this front were the Habsburg empire in AustriaHungary, a genuine 1,000-year reich with roots in Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, and whose determination to fight Serbia to avenge the murders of the
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo made war inevitable. Austria went into the war thanks to the promise of support from Germany, a superior military power that had provided the so-called “blank cheque” to its allies in July 1914 to go ahead and do what it felt it must to gain that revenge.
The first power to mobilise, however, was Russia, which chose to fight to defend its fellow Slavs in Serbia. This dragged in Russia’s French allies in the Entente, and Germany’s decision to invade France through Belgium brought in the British Empire, completing the train of events that caused a world-changing and fundamentally disastrous war.
Later, and also part of Lloyd’s picture of this front, the Italians came in to fight the Austrians, hoping for Trieste and other territorial gains; the Romanians came in behind the Allies, too, while the Bulgarians joined the Central Powers. An important part of The Eastern Front is also the detail of how an expeditionary force of French and British troops arrived by sea at Salonika and, eventually, led a campaign to liberate Serbia from the south.
Lloyd depicts a war in the east characterised by overstretch and attrition, and in which an old sense of almost feudal obligation to crown and country is swept away by the realities of a mindless conflict and what becomes its inevitable consequence, uprising and revolt by those pressed to fight. Germany has to fight in both the west and the east, which causes conflict within its high command and with its Austrian allies, who complain constantly that more German men and firepower would have quickly finished off an often incompetent and disorientated Russian enemy. Austria concentrated on seeing off the Russians in Galicia and the southern stretch of the front, but whereas the Germans had thrashed Russia at Tannenberg in the autumn of 1914 and continued to harry their forces right to the end, the Austrians were in a constant back-and-forth with them. Nothing decisive happened until Russia turned in upon itself in 1917, and chose to fight the class struggle rather than any external enemy.
Lloyd describes the events of the Russian Revolution clearly and illuminatingly, and has a particularly fine account of the conference at Brest-Litovsk in the winter of 1917-18 that confirmed Russia’s departure from the war. The tsar’s army had, after February 1917 when the people had had enough, imploded in a lethal riot of indiscipline that progressed to murdering its officers and, in increasing number, refusing to fight.
Once Lenin seized power in November 1917, he made it clear Russia would leave the war forthwith, though he tried to impose terms (through his plenipotentiary, Trotsky) that would have been better from a
A swift outcome was never possible. There weren’t enough guns, food or, in the end, men
conqueror and not a supplicant. Germany then annexed a large swath of eastern Europe, Russia and Ukraine, and put Russia back in its box. The consequences of that, and subsequent boundary revisions, are still being fought out to this day.
Throughout the conflict on this front, a swift and decisive outcome was prevented because of insufficient war production – there were never enough guns, rifles, ammunition, warm clothing, boots, food or, in the end, men – and that was why the Central Powers eventually lost. Even after the great offensive of 1918 in the west, which seemed to have decided the Allies’ defeat, a combination of under-supply and plummeting morale ensured the collapse of Austria-Hungary and Germany.
Lloyd is right to salute the actions of Karl, the young prince who succeeded his uncle Franz Josef as Austro-Hungarian emperor and king in 1916, and almost immediately started to use his family connections to open channels with the French and British to end the conflict. The old military caste in Prussia and Russia would not hear of it, but in the end, the beleaguered and demoralised people spoke. In the east, especially, this was a predictably pigheaded end to a war whose fantastic destructiveness did not end in 1918.